


A Mage's Dream

by SectoBoss



Category: A Redtail's Dream (Webcomic), Stand Still Stay Silent
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-28
Updated: 2015-04-28
Packaged: 2018-03-26 06:30:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,192
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3840577
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SectoBoss/pseuds/SectoBoss
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When they’re ambushed by one of the dreamworld’s monsters, all hope seems lost for Lalli and Reynir. Fortunately, help is at hand – from some oddly familiar faces.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Mage's Dream

The waters of the dreamworld closed over Lalli’s head, cutting short his scream. He clamped his lips shut but not before a few small bubbles of air had escaped him, little silver bubbles shimmying upwards towards the starlight. A precious few seconds of oxygen that he no longer had. 

The monster dragged him deeper. Hands clamped around his legs gripped him like vices, leaving deep bruises in his flesh. Looking down, squinting through the murk, Lalli saw a billowing mass of dark flesh and gleaming bone. Skulls looked back up at him, clattering their teeth in excitement, their sightless eye sockets regarding him with cold mockery. Desperately he reached for his knife, his fingers scrabbling at the scabbard on his belt. Through the roar and the rush in his ears he heard the muffled cries and helpless thrashing of the other one – had he said his name was Reynir? – as he too was hauled down into the depths. 

More hands came through the water towards him, lithe and graceful, like this was some wonderful game they were playing. Skulls rose up as well, human and animal alike, twisting this way and that on their leathery stems. They lunged at him as he finally freed his knife and swung it frantically to and fro. Its gleaming blade cut a swathe through the monster as it bore down on him, carving apart limbs and shattering bone into pieces. But for every part of it that he rent and tore, for every drop of the monster’s inky black blood he spilled out into the water, more and more of it rose from below. The monster was toying with him, letting him get a few hits in before it delivered the killing blow. 

And here it came. 

The hands on his legs tightened their grip and yanked him down, hard. At the same time something swept down from his right, an angular crag of bone and antlers, blindsiding him and crashing into the side of his head. Pain splintered across Lalli’s head and his vision span as he was sent careering through the water, his knife tumbling from his grasp even as the monster tightened its own. The breath he had so carefully held was knocked from him in a startled gasp. 

Stunned, Lalli looked blearily around him. There was blood in the water around his head, curling lazily out from a gash across his temple. Through the murk he could faintly make out Reynir struggling weakly against the hands and claws that held him, expending the last of his air in a terrified sob. Lalli felt his eyes drifting closed. He didn’t care. The pain in his head was unbearable and his lungs were on fire. Hands gripped his arms and chest and face, skulls loomed in the fading light and grinned in triumph, and all he wanted to do was sleep. 

All of a sudden, a track of light seared across his vision. Something small and bright and fast flitted down through the water and buried itself in one of the monster’s heads. The bone crumpled beneath its impact, shards spinning out through the water. The monster screeched in pain and recoiled. Down came another of these things, and another, their aim true and their impacts devastating. Within seconds the water around Lalli was a sludge of broken bone and tattered meat. The hands on his legs lost their grip and fell away as the monster retreated from this new enemy, and from above him something reached down and gripped him by the collar and hauled him up towards the surface and the light. 

He emerged from the water coughing and spluttering. Hard ground materialised beneath him and he collapsed onto it gratefully, rolling over onto his back and staring up at the starry sky as he gulped down as much of the cold, crisp air as he could. 

Lalli heard footsteps next to him and groaned quietly to himself, expecting to at any moment see Onni stood over him with that what-have-you-gone-and-done- _now_ expression his face. It was a look Onni had got down to an art form, and Lalli was privately convinced that his cousin must spend a good amount of his time practicing his exasperated scowls in the mirror. 

“I swear all we do these days is rescue dumb kids.” 

Lalli blinked. That was _not_ Onni’s voice. 

From across the way came the sound of splashing water and the gasp of someone drawing breath. “What’s the alternative? Let them die?” asked another voice in reply, its words strained as if the speaker was carrying something heavy. 

“Not my problem,” said the first voice. 

There was a thump of something heavy being dumped onto the ground. “The Swan wouldn’t see it that way. Her backlog’s bad enough as it is. Also, that’s a _terrible_ thing to say!” 

Confused and increasingly alarmed, Lalli propped himself up on his elbows and looked in the direction of the first voice. Instead of his cousin, there was a man he’d never seen before stood looking down at him with a mixture of annoyance and contempt on his face. He was clad in traditional hunting furs and carried a bow slung over one shoulder. A hood made from a wolf’s pelt covered the top of his head, lending him a slightly vicious appearance that Lalli didn’t like the look of at all. 

“At least this one’s alive,” the man said, addressing someone behind Lalli. “Yours looks like he’s bit the dust.” 

“Oh, he’ll be fine. I think he’s fainted.” The voice paused and there was a sniffing sound, like an inquisitive dog. “Yuck. I think he’s wet himself too.” 

Lalli looked over his shoulder. Behind him Reynir lay sprawled out on some rocks, his face ashen and his clothes sodden. Next to him was a second man, stockier than the first and with light orange hair instead of ashen blond. He wore the same hunting furs and carried an identical bow. He grinned cheerfully at Lalli and sauntered over to him. 

“Your friend will be fine,” he said, squatting down on his haunches next to Lalli. “You’re quite lucky we happened by. Were you supposed to be meeting someone here?” 

His confusion mounting by the second, Lalli decided to fall back on his time-honoured tactic of saying nothing to the strangers and waiting for someone who knew what was going on to come along and sort everything out. Anyway, for all he knew these people could be a pair of hiisi or something of the sort. Actually, that seemed pretty likely now he thought of it. Lalli had heard stories of hiisi ambushing mages in their dreams, disguising themselves as humans and leading them off into the depths of the dreamworld, never to be seen again. He retreated into his coat and cast nervous, suspicious glances at the two men in front of him. 

“Are you all right?” the orange-haired one asked, worry starting to creep into his expression. 

“He might just be _really_ stupid,” replied the other. 

The one with orange hair crawled over to Lalli’s side and put what was probably intended to be a friendly arm around the young mage’s shoulders. Lalli cringed away from the contact but the man didn’t seem to register his discomfort. “I’m Ville,” he said, extending his free hand, “and Mr Grumpy over there…” 

“I heard that!” snapped the other man. 

“… is Hannu. What’s your name?” he finished, with just the tiniest smirk at the other one’s annoyance. 

Lalli looked down at Ville’s outstretched hand, vaguely recognising the gesture from when he had been introduced to their healer. What was he supposed to do again? Oh yes. Gingerly, he took the outstretched hand and shook it. If this man was a hiisi, he was the strangest one he’d ever heard of. 

“Lalli…” he replied quietly. 

“Nice to meet you, Lalli,” Ville replied. “See?” he said, looking accusingly up at Hannu. “He’s not stupid! He’s probably just in shock from what we rescued him from.” 

Hannu just grunted. “Yeah. Feel free to thank us, if you can spare the time,” he growled at Lalli. 

“Oh, _why_ must you be so mean to everyone we meet?” demanded Ville. “This is why you don’t have any friends, you know.” 

“You say it like it’s a bad thing,” Hannu huffed, defensively. 

“It _is_ a bad thing! You’d think after all the time we’ve spent here that someone would…” he trailed off. “ _BEHIND YOU!_ ” 

Behind Hannu the dark waters exploded upwards in a burst of white froth and flecks of foam. He span around to see pitch-black arms thrust out from the surface, hands pitter-pattering blindly across the rocks. The monster, still bearing the ragged wounds from where it had been injured earlier, had clearly decided to try its luck again. It began hauling itself out of the water and slithering towards the four of them. 

Ville shoved Lalli to one side and started to scramble to his feet, readying his bow as he did so. But Hannu was one step ahead of him, unshouldering his own bow and nocking an arrow as the monster bore down upon him. Almost calmly he stood his ground as it charged, drawing the string back and releasing the arrow straight at the eye socket of one of the monster’s heads. The arrow burned a brilliant white as it leapt from the string like a live thing and streaked across the short distance between the two, leaving a sizzling trail in the air behind it. Lalli recognised the arrows as the same type that had dispatched the monster when it had been trying to drag him under. 

The arrow stuck the head dead-centre and the skull _burst_ , like it was made of cheap glass. The monster howled and staggered and took a swipe at Hannu with one of its remaining arms. His eyes went wide and he hurriedly tried to ready another arrow as the clawed hand swung towards his head but by now Ville had his own arrow drawn and loosed. This one scythed through the monster’s flesh like it was nothing, searing aside flesh and bone and opening up wounds that gaped like hungry mouths. The arm that had been about to crush Hannu’s skull flopped to the ground, severed and useless. The monster screamed, a primal scream of pain and fear, and hastily scrambled back towards the waters it had emerged from. It had almost made it back when Hannu’s arrow leapt from his bow and bored straight through its flanks, deep into its heart. 

The monster toppled to one side and gave a last bubbling groan before falling still. Silence returned to the dreamworld, broken only by the faint hiss of burning flesh and the drip of water from the monster’s hide. 

“And stay out!” Hannu shouted at its corpse. He turned back to Lalli and Ville, his expression troubled. “That was close,” he sighed. “I swear they’ve been getting bolder recently.” 

Ville shouldered his bow and squatted down next to Lalli again. “Look,” he said, his friendliness tempered with an edge of concern. “It’s not safe here, not right now. Take your friend-” he pointed to Reynir, still splayed unconscious on the rocks, “-and get away. There might be more of these things around. Let us deal with them, okay?” 

“We should get moving too,” Hannu pointed out. 

Ville straightened up and the two of them started to walk off, following the paths of just-submerged rocks across the dreamworld and towards the banks of mist that marked its boundaries. 

“Wait!” Lalli blurted out, as much to his own surprise as anyone else’s. The two stopped and turned back round. “Who _are_ you people?” he asked, feeling horribly self-conscious. 

Ville looked at him in confusion. “Didn’t I tell you? I’m Ville, and…” 

“I told you he was stupid,” Hannu muttered under his breath. 

“No, I mean… why are you here? What are you doing?” Lalli asked, struggling to find the right way to put it. 

Hannu laughed, mirthlessly. “We’re guarding the front door, kid.” He gestured towards the remains of the monster slumped limply across the rocks. “Making sure none of these things get where they’re not wanted.” 

“What…?” 

Hannu raised an eyebrow. “Put it this way – if ever you meet a swan out here, do _not_ piss her off. We did that once, a long time ago. Now we have to do her chores.” 

This man was definitely a hiisi, Lalli decided. All he did was speak in riddles. With a final wave from Ville, the two of them walked off across the water and into the mist. Their voices echoed after them like ghosts. 

“That was a pretty good shot back there. Thanks.” 

“Hannu, really, it was nothing…” 

“No, I’m serious. That thing probably would have gotten me otherwise.” A pause, the voices grew fainter with every step. “I guess I don’t need any other friends, do I? Not when I’ve got you looking out for me.” 

The mist turned them into shadows, then outlines, and then they were gone. The heroes of another tale walked onwards, their story not quite over.

**Author's Note:**

> I’ve just noticed that this is the second story I’ve written now where Lalli ends up in trouble and has to get help from elsewhere. It’s not that I think he’s incompetent, more that he has a very dangerous job.


End file.
